Baker Center Program to Focus on ‘Politics of the 2010 Census’

KNOXVILLE — The former director of the U.S. Census Bureau will be the featured speaker at a luncheon sponsored by the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy on Feb. 22.

Charles Louis Kincannon will speak on “Who Counts in the Decennial: The Politics of the 2010 Census” at 11:30 a.m. Toyota Auditorium in the Baker Center, 1640 Cumberland Ave.

Registration is required. RSVP by Friday, Feb. 19 to Betsy Harrell at 974-0931 or bharrel5@utk.edu. Lunch is $15. A no lunch option is available.

Kincannon will discuss the political implications of this year’s decennial census. He will cover how the census counts people and whether to count immigrants, documented or not, where to count prisoners, and how to deal with university students, American residents overseas or persons with residence in two states.

In March, mandatory census forms will be delivered to every residence in the United States and Puerto Rico. The information collected in the census is crucial in apportioning seats in the U.S. House of Representative and deciding how more than $400 billion dollars of federal funding is spent each year on infrastructure and services, such as hospitals, job-training centers, schools, senior centers, public works projects and emergency services.

Kincannon served as the director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 2001-08. He began his career at the U.S. Census Bureau in 1963 after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin. In 1975, he joined the staff of the Office of Management and Budget, where he worked on statistical and regulatory policy. He also served as the statistical liaison to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller’s office and provided administrative leadership that supported the successful implementation of the first Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980. He returned to the Census Bureau in September 1981 as deputy director, and also served as acting director from July 1983 to March 1984 and again from January to December 1989, during which time he directed the final preparations for the 1990 census. Throughout his tenure with the federal government, Kincannon received several awards recognizing his contributions, including the Presidential Rank Award of Meritorious Service and the Department of Commerce Gold Medal. In October 1992, Kincannon was appointed as the first chief statistician in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. He left that post in June 2000 to return to the U.S. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed him as director of the U.S. Census Bureau.